New Common Ground Democracy column, with this subtitle: “The consequences of the nation’s two-party system is vividly on display with the elimination of Kyrsten Sinema and Nikki Haley from their respective races.” Since writing the column last night, I was listening to Chuck Todd’s most recent podcast with Amy Walter, and one point they made that is relevant to the Common Ground Democracy column is that, whereas Arizona’s 2018 U.S. Senate race between Sinema and Martha McSally was contested within the 40 or 45 yard lines, to invoke the football analogy, this year’s race between Sinema and Kari Lake will involve candidates positioned much closer to each of the end zones. As the two of them observed, this kind of electoral competition in a 50-50 purple state, like Arizona, is much different than the Sinema-McSally race even though the state is equally purple in both cases. This point is the critical one, given the partisan polarization of American politics, and is why the analysis of the new Atkinson-Ganz paper that I highlighted in my previous Common Ground Democracy column is so important.

Houston Chronicle:

The Court of Criminal Appeals upsets are much more clearly attributable to Paxton and his political allies, Jones said.

At a campaign event for Marc LaHood in San Antonio in January, Paxton asked for a show of hands of anyone in the room who could name all nine justices. Sure enough, none could.

But he explained why he was making it his mission to make sure they knew about their 2021 opinion that stopped him from unilaterally prosecuting election fraud and the names of their opponents.

Former Dallas appellate judge David Schenck and lawyers Gina Parker and Lee Finley won their races over Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judges Barbara Parker Hervey and Michelle Slaughter, respectively.

“Activist judges have no place on our courts, and tonight’s results reflect the will of the people,” Paxton said in a statement late Tuesday night.

The judges had defended their decision by saying they were following the state Constitution, which they said was clear about the limits of Paxton’s authority.

The upsets translate to a loss of about 60 years of experience from the bench: Keller was first elected in 1994, Hervey in 2000 and Slaughter in 2018.

Katie Porter, who did not make it into the top-two primary for the CA Senate race after coming in behind Adam Schiff and Steve Garvey put out a message saying “Because of you, we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”

After she was attacked for appearing to attack the integrity of the election system, she put out a follow up message saying that by “rigged” she means that she means that “our politics are manipulated by big dark money….At no time time have I ever undermined the vote count and election process in CA, which is beyond reproach.”

I’m a former colleague of Katie’s at UC Irvine, and I know what she is trying to say. And I’m a big opponent of Citizens United and undisclosed spending in campaigns. (I wrote a whole book about it.)

But calling an election “rigged” in these times is irresponsible. These comments will be taken out of context to claim that Katie is as bad as Trump in saying that the election system is unfair. This will cause more people to doubt the integrity of the election process.

There are better ways to criticize the outsized role of money in politics than to use language that suggests the election process itself is not conducted in a fair manner.

As someone noted on Twitter, Katie’s real complaint is about the top two primary, and how Schiff tried to raise the profile of Steve Garvey, who would be a weaker candidate in the fall than Katie would have been.